Findings of the AmericasNLP 2026 Shared Task on Cultural Image Captioning for Indigenous Languages

Minh Duc Bui, David Guzmán, Abteen Ebrahimi, Franklin Morales, Marvin Agüero-Torales, Raquel Insfrán, Cecilia González, Ramón Araujo, Luca Cernuzzi, Carlos Raul Noh Chi, Carlos Eduardo Tec Cahun, Sindi Estrella Poot Cohuo, Daniel Ricardo Benítez Chi, Santos Natanael Palomo Arévalo, Jessica Elizabeth Canul Canche, Deysi Aracely Poot Poot, Wendy Marleny Dzib Dzib, Eduardo José Ake Pool, Reynaldo Alexander Couoh Martin, Silvia Fernandez Sabido, Luis Samuel Santiago Melchor, Sotero Silverio, Robert Pugh, Raúl Vázquez, John E. Ortega, Arturo Oncevay, Rubén Manrique, Luis Chiruzzo, Rolando Coto-Solano, Elisabeth Mager, Shruti Rijhwani, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Manuel Mager, Katharina von der Wense

Abstract
Indigenous languages of the Americas face severe endangerment, and the scarcity of culturally grounded resources remains a critical barrier to revitalization efforts. We present the AmericasNLP 2026 Shared Task on Cultural Image Captioning for Indigenous Languages, the first shared task dedicated to generating captions for images depicting Indigenous cultures of the Americas, written in the Indigenous languages themselves. To support this, we introduce and publicly release a newly constructed dataset spanning five cultures and their dominant languages: Bribri, Guaraní, Yucatec Maya, Central Veracruz Nahuatl, and Wixárika. Evaluation follows a two-stage process, combining automatic evaluation using ChrF++ with human evaluation of the top-performing systems for each language. Eight teams participate, submitting 27 systems in total. Results indicate that the task remains largely unsolved: while the strongest systems produce understandable captions, they fall short on descriptive detail and, critically, cultural grounding.
Anthology ID:
2026.americasnlp-6.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Manuel Mager, Abteen Ebrahimi, Minh Duc Bui, Robert Pugh, Arturo Oncevay, Luis Chiruzzo, Rolando Coto Solano, Shruti Rijhwani, Katharina Von Der Wense
Venues:
AmericasNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
279–295
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.americasnlp-6.27/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minh Duc Bui, David Guzmán, Abteen Ebrahimi, Franklin Morales, Marvin Agüero-Torales, Raquel Insfrán, Cecilia González, Ramón Araujo, Luca Cernuzzi, Carlos Raul Noh Chi, Carlos Eduardo Tec Cahun, Sindi Estrella Poot Cohuo, Daniel Ricardo Benítez Chi, Santos Natanael Palomo Arévalo, Jessica Elizabeth Canul Canche, Deysi Aracely Poot Poot, Wendy Marleny Dzib Dzib, Eduardo José Ake Pool, Reynaldo Alexander Couoh Martin, Silvia Fernandez Sabido, Luis Samuel Santiago Melchor, Sotero Silverio, Robert Pugh, Raúl Vázquez, John E. Ortega, Arturo Oncevay, Rubén Manrique, Luis Chiruzzo, Rolando Coto-Solano, Elisabeth Mager, Shruti Rijhwani, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Manuel Mager, and Katharina von der Wense. 2026. Findings of the AmericasNLP 2026 Shared Task on Cultural Image Captioning for Indigenous Languages. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP), pages 279–295, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Findings of the AmericasNLP 2026 Shared Task on Cultural Image Captioning for Indigenous Languages (Bui et al., AmericasNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.americasnlp-6.27.pdf
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